Mushy, we hardly knew ye
Musharraf was ineffectual, corrupt, duplicitous, and brutal. And what ultimately follows him could be even worse -- which is, of course, the stated reason why the U.S. stayed in his corner for so long, although given the high level of cognitive dissonance and sheer lunacy in the State Department, there were probably other reasons as well.
"Pakistan's Musharraf steps down," from the BBC, August 18
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who is facing impeachment by parliament, says he will resign.The charges against the president include violation of the constitution and gross misconduct.
Mr Musharraf said he was confident that the charges against him would not stand but that this was not the time for more confrontation in Pakistan.
He has been one of the United States' strongest allies in its war against Islamist extremism. [...]
The drive to impeach him has been led by Nawaz Sharif, the head of Pakistan's second biggest political party, the PML-N. It was Mr Sharif who President Musharraf, then head of the army, deposed in a bloodless coup in 1999....
What might be to come? Well, Nawaz Sharif's star is on the rise. And as for him, note this revealing little tidbit, buried in the 29th paragraph of last Friday's Wall Street Journal story about Musharraf's intention to resign, "Musharraf Set to Quit And Receive Immunity," by Peter Wonacott and Zahid Hussain, August 15:
In the past, Mr. Sharif has shown his own authoritarian streak. He has had unfriendly journalists jailed. While he helped open Pakistan's economy to foreign investment, he courted the military and religious conservatives for political support. A bill that he supported would have introduced Islamic Sharia law to the criminal-justice system.
Sharif's party won 91 seats in Pakistan's elections last February, which were widely reported as a repudiation of the "Islamist" parties in that country. The mainstream media and the learned analysts were not at that time taking note of Sharif's support for the imposition of Sharia law. But luckily, the free world has the 29th paragraph of Wall Street Journal stories in which to discover the truth.
Well, gentlemen, you won't have ol' Perez to kick around any more.
I recall an anecdote I heard somewhere, about two Nineteenth-Century Russian Jews: one young, one old. "Old Man," asks the younger, "why do you pray for the Tsar?"--to which the elder replies, "My son, I have lived long enough to know that the next Tsar is always worse; so I pray for the Tsar."
Oops--make that Parvez, if you please.
John C
That's a good reason to cheer the exit of Musharraf, so that those who bought into his taquiyya can now be brought into the group of people who recognize that Pakistan needs to be defanged - particularly with its nukes.
Those who thought him an ally should re-read/view his post 9/11 speech to his country in Urdu, where he invoked the treaty of Hudaibiyya as a reason to follow the US as the need of the hour. After Bhutto's assassination, I noted that she was by no means a hero, given her regime's creation of the Taliban. Similarly, Musharraf ain't one either. Sharief is the best because he is the least of a taquiyya artist than those other 2, of which one is dead, and another exiled. Now, if someone would remove Bilawal Bhutto, so that we don't have any Oxford educated taquiyya artists pulling wool over our eyes.
It's not surprising that Sharief is pro-Shariah - those who follow Pakistan should know that he was the inheritor of General Zia as the leader of his party: when Zia was President, Sharief was Chief Minister of Panjab province, and after the former's death, he became the focal point of Bhutto's opposition.
To sum it up - I'd rather see a genuine Jihadi in power in Islamabad, rather than a taquiyya artist like Bhutto or Musharraf.
Apres moi, le jihad.
I have to disagree with your assessment. Not that Musharaff doesn't display typical Asiatic chameleon traits, but in that world he was as close to a James Madison as we're likely to get for some time now. I also don't think "brutal" should be among your sobriquets. What brutality did Mush indulge in? I construe brutal as violent. In any case, you must agree that compared to Nawaz Sharif Musharaff is like GHW Bush, or something. As for his relations with his own people, of course: has nothing been more conspicuously displayed this past 7 years that Pakistan's biggest problem is Pakistanis? And you have to take their ridiculous sensibilities into account if you want to govern them - even if to push them only slightly in the righ direction?
Musharaff's worst legacy will be the ceding of territory and some measure of sovereignty to the disgusting tribes of the FATA, for which he should be abused. But as rulers of Pakistan go, he was pretty damn good, really.
To sum it up - I'd rather see a genuine Jihadi in power in Islamabad, rather than a taquiyya artist like Bhutto or Musharraf.
Posted by: Infidel Pride at August 18, 2008 6:46 AM
I have to agree with you, although there is something to be said for the devil you know.
Thirty billion dollars later, Our Great Pakistani Hope, has not waited to utter his nunc dimittis, and has taken his conge, has dismissed himself before others could embarrass him by doing it for him.
There he was, Musharraf, our Stout Friend, last in that long line of Pakistani generals (or will Kayani swiftly replace Musharraf, will bets be placed on his trustworthiness, stout-heartedness, fierce opposition to "Muslim extremists" etc. too? In other words, will there be no end to this, where faith in a man replaces an understanding of what prompts the primitives who make up nearly the whole society, a society and state suffused with Islam?) who, for the last fifty years, have been fooling American generals ("you wouldn't fool us, woould you?" "I would if I could.") into thinking of them as stout-hearted fellows, pukka sahibs with terry-thomas moustaches, so much better than those leftist Indians with their New Left Book Club subscriptions still in force -- oh, think of Nehru, whom the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, and their limited ilk, could practically see still walking in the Fellows' Garden with Sidney Webb, or Harold Laski, or Victor Gollancz; think of Krishna Menon getting the goat of the Dulles brothers in Bandung, or some other conference; think of the Soviets building steel mills for India and how much to the advantage of Pakistan that kind of thing reverberated in Washington, where Islam was, all through the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s -- a little boost from ARAMCO didn't hurt -- seen only as a "bulwark against Communism."
It's time to put away childish things -- as perhaps has been undrestood about the misconceptions, and the inattention, to Russia. It's time to see Islam as what it is, as what the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira contain, and the tenets that arise naturally from those canonical texts, and the atttidues toward Infidels that Islam inculcates, and that create a miasma of hostility, not to be dissipated by Western generosity, that hangs over, like the pollution over Beijing, any society suffused with Islam, and even those who within that society claim to be less primitive and more enlightened, and mock the "extremists," will nonetheless help in their own way to prolong Infdiel confusion, just as long as those "advanced" members of any Muslim state or society still cling -- out of fear or filial piety or confusion or a blend of all three-- to the notion that "Islam is a good thing" and, by continuing against all the evidence to defend it, this Total Belief-System that is responsible for the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Muslim societies, to be, not as some seem to think our alies, but rather, in the effect that they have, promoters of, or enablers of, Jihad, even if they would be horrified to think so, and horrified that such a charge could, and would be made, not by Infidel idiots, but by Infidels well-versed in the texts, tenets, attitudes of Islam, and in the history of Muslim conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims.
Pakistan: thirty billion dollars down the drain. Not as bad as Iraq, where the squandering has now reached close to two trillion. Not as bad as Egypt, with close to $70 billion now given to a country whose population, hating the regime, becomes with every American dollar supplied that corrupt Mubarak-Family-and-Friends Plan more anti-American (it never ceased to be viciously anti-Israel) every day. Not as bad as Afghanistan, where the Bright Idea of Secretary Gates is now to send another twenty billion to the hopeless case of Afghanistan, in the forlorn hope that something -- anything -- will make things better, as if "making things better" in Muslim countries is the best way to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam, or to force Muslims, or at least the thinking minority among them, to begin aloud to connect Islam and those political, economic, social, etc. failures that can so easily be linked to Islam itself.
How many more tens of billions will flow to Pakistan for a pitiful raid here, or bombing run there? When will the American military, on the spot, and the civilians at home, decide that a much less compliant polcy, and an end to this idiotic creation, the Infidel Man's Burden,makes much better sense if the Camp of Islam, with all of its instruments for conducting the Jihad, is to be held in check, and weakened from within so that it cannot continue to threaten the West, and the rest of the Infidel world, as it so obviously does, but mainly through, not terrorism, but the Money Weapon, Da'wa, and demographic conquest?
Could it be true what my friend told me in early 2004 that there might exist a financial deal between Bush and Mush - a part of money for war on terror gets routed through Mush back to Bush. Now Bush term is getting over and so does Mush's. All Mush needs to do next is catch a plane to Texas ranch to live happily everafter. May be true!
Could it be true what my friend told me in early 2004 that there might exist a financial deal between Bush and Mush - a part of money for war on terror gets routed through Mush back to Bush. Now Bush term is getting over and so does Mush's. All Mush needs to do next is catch a plane to Texas ranch to live happily everafter. May be true!
Could it be true what my friend told me in early 2004 that there might exist a financial deal between Bush and Mush - a part of money for war on terror gets routed through Mush back to Bush. Now Bush term is getting over and so does Mush's. All Mush needs to do next is catch a plane to Texas ranch to live happily everafter. May be true!